Sunday, June 16, 2013

My
mother has always been the one who really reads. The fact that she
influenced me most as a reader is indisputable. She taught me to read by
age three, and some of my earliest memories are of trips to the library
with her, stopping at the cemetery on the walk home to rest and read on
one of the concrete benches there. I always checked out the limit (ten
books), but I would get into trouble if I checked out titles and didn’t
finish them. My mother seemed to think it it was greedy -- that I was
depriving others of the chance to have the book while I wasted it.

So, I
finished them.

That's me in the middle, no doubt thinking about acrylic plastic.

My
father, on the other hand, isn’t so much of a book person. He’s smart,
all right, and he does read, but while I was growing up, my main
memories of my father reading are of him reading the newspaper. (When I
got a little older, I’d catch him reading my copies of MAD magazine, too.) He was a huge fan of Pogo, a
cartoon whose politics went over my head as a child, but I still tried to read it,
because I knew he liked it. I loved the inventive use of language --
like a code that I had to solve.

Early
on, though, my father was a big supporter of my reading and my writing.
He always bragged about my reading to anyone who would listen, and
recognized me as a force to be reckoned with. In response to one of my
blog posts recently, Dad posted this on my Facebook wall:

“When
Kelly was almost 5, she walked into my bedroom and asked me ‘What is
acrylic plastic?’ She was holding the Knoxville News Sentinel. I knew at
that moment that we were already reading equals.”

Pogo: Fun fer everybody what's a frog.

Dad
was in the aluminum siding business when I made a hand-drawn comic book
featuring a superhero made out of aluminum. Alu-Man #1 was one of my
greatest triumphs, and Dad was its biggest fan, taking it to work to share with his friends and
co-workers. My mother was livid, and made him stop. She was worried
that one of my characters -- a large woman with a bouffant hairdo --
would upset the secretary at my Dad’s office. (She was a large woman
with a bouffant hairdo.)

My favorite memory of my father and reading is far more serious than Pogo or Alu-Man, though.

He
was sitting on my bed talking to me, his 6’ 6” frame dwarfing my little
room with its yellow chintz bedspread. I had massive amounts of books
for a third grader, and he glanced through them, then picked one up and
held it out to me. It was Tom Sawyer.

“Promise me you’ll read this some day,” he said.

“Okay,” I shrugged. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I remember asking my father to promise to read my favorite book at the time: The Wednesday Witch.

I doubt he read The Wednesday Witch (That’s okay. It’s not exactly in my top ten anymore.) But I did read Tom Sawyer. And The Count of Monte Cristo. And David Copperfield. And
on and on. To this day, while I read mysteries and humor and comics and
shampoo bottles and whatever is around, I still come back to the
classics.

See, in a room filled with Richie Rich and Hot Stuff comics, Trixie Belden mysteries,
and every Scholastic monster book printed in the early ‘70s, my father
spotted the one diamond in the pulp. His message is clear now, even if
it was lost on me then:

The folks at the Comics Should Be Good
site have a pretty simple philosophy: they believe, as their name says,
that comics should be good. While the site does a deft job of covering
the comics scene, the most magical things happen at their Twitter feed.
(Check it out.)

In
a weekly feature called The Line It Is Drawn, a topic is thrown out to
Twitter followers who come up with their own suggestions. CSBG’s very
talented sketch artists draw their favorites. The results are always
good at the very least, awesome at their best.

Case
in point: a recent challenge to create “Rejected children’s books
starring comic book characters.” My favorites are below. Visit Comics Should Be Good to see the full selection.

What
children’s book/comic book combos would you like to see? While it’s too
late to submit to this round, be sure and check out the CSBG Twitter
feed, and you might see your idea come to life in a future challenge.

About Me

I'm a freelance magazine writer and web ghostwriter with bylines in a slew of newsstand magazines. I'm a writer of both serious essays (Smithsonian) and oddball humor (Cracked). My current obsession is lost horror films, and I'm busily finishing a book on the subject—an expansion of a feature article for Rue Morgue magazine that was nominated for article of the year in the Rondo Hatton Awards for excellence in classic horror research. I'm this year's recipient of the Horror Writer's Association's Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship for non-fiction writing. I'm also the founder and host of Knoxferatu, a silent horror film event in Knoxville, TN. You can find my most recent writing in the book Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, to which I contributed a chapter on murder ballads (selected by Vogue magazine as one of the best books of 2017 in their year-end roundup).